Sexual assault within the ranks has reached shocking levels and while some awareness around female service members’ has belatedly begun, the 52% of male victims still struggle to get justice – and redemption

Squinting so he could drive through the vodka and the pills, Heath Phillips searched for a tree he could wrap his truck around.

It was a frigid February day in 2009, some 200 miles north-west of New York City, on a road Phillips drove every day to get to work. He describes this moment as his rock bottom, but it was not his first suicide attempt. Twenty-one years earlier, Phillips had first tried to kill himself aboard the ammunition ship USS Butte after his shipmates repeatedly raped him.

Phillips enlisted in the navy days before his 17th birthday. He had dreamed of serving since he was a little boy and looked forward to a 20-year career in the military. Instead, the trauma of his repeated sexual assault shattered him and forced him to leave after barely a year.

If he could have stayed, Phillips would have been retired with a military pension by the time he drove his Nissan Pathfinder for what he thought would be the final time.

Phillips says he “was not a good person” in the aftermath of his assault. “I’ve been in and out of jail. I’ve been arrested. I have been homeless. I have older sons who know me but we’re not close, because I don’t know how to be close to them.” He continues: “I did what I knew how to do: I drank. From drinking, I started popping pills. I couldn’t hold a job because I couldn’t handle being near anybody. I couldn’t be near men. If they reminded me of something, I’d walk off a job … All I cared about is: I want to be drunk, I don’t want to remember this,” he told the Guardian.

Phillips never found the tree. The next thing he remembers is waking up in his truck. That day, he dumped out all of his drugs and alcohol – even his cigarettes – and began a long struggle to reclaim his life.

Heath Phillips holding a photo of himself when he was in the navy. Photograph: Shane Lavalette/The Guardian

Phillips is closer to the typical survivor of sexual assault in the US military than he is a deviation from it. According to the most recent statistics from the Pentagon, of the 20,300 service members sexually assaulted in 2014, 10,600 were men – a rate over 52%.

Sexual assault within the military has reached shocking levels.In 2013, one in four women using the Department of Veterans Affairs’ healthcare screened positivefor military sexual assault. While awareness around female service members’ ordeal lags far behind solutions, it has belatedly begun, in part due to efforts from US senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Claire McCaskill and the award-winning documentary The Invisible War.

Yet male service members who experience military sexual assault remain even less visible. Studies by the Rand Corporation and the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ research arm, indicate that only 40% of women service members report their sexual assaults, compared with just 13% of men.

This lack of visibility can be partly blamed on common narratives within the military, which often diminish the threat to female service members and erase the threat to male ones outright.

One of those faulty narratives was reaffirmed by someone seeking to be their commander-in-chief. During a presidential forum last month, Donald Trump defended a 2013 tweet asking: “what did these geniuses expect when they put men and women together?”, adding “the best thing we could do is set up a court system within the military” (and, in doing so, described the system already in place).

Trump wouldn’t be able to walk a mile in my shoes

Heath Phillips

Nearly eight years after he nearly ended his own life, Phillips laughs when asked what he would say to Trump should they be face to face.

“I’d have to regroup my composure,” he begins.

“He’s very, very ill-informed. He doesn’t know more than the commanders know. He doesn’t know more than the sexual assault survivors know. He wouldn’t be able to walk a mile in my shoes.”

•••

In the affluent Dallas suburb of Southlake, Annie Kendzior, 26, sips an iced coffee as she recounts the multiple times her fellow midshipmen at the US Naval Academy raped her. We sit on the patio overlooking her family’s huge backyard, with her loquacious and passionate father, Russ, beside her. At times seething as she shares her story, he interjects and vows to shame the US military into reform.

Kendzior was a star high-school soccer player with a 3.8 grade point average. The Naval Academy, incubator of the officer corps of the navy and marines, recruited her in her junior year. Steeped in pro-military Texas culture and her grandfathers’ second world war service, Kendzior figured an education at the academy, followed by a commission in the navy, would prepare her for the challenging life in the business world she ultimately sought.

Kendzior entered the Annapolis, Maryland-based academy in 2008 and immediately encountered an atmosphere of machismo. She overheard still-juvenile young men refer to certain women as “dubs”, an acronym for dumb ugly bitches. At her first off-campus house party, Kendzior got drunk faster than she expected as a result of boot camp and her soccer regimen. She didn’t want to pass out on a puke-covered floor, so when a second-year midshipman told her there was a bed she could sleep in, she took the chance.

“I woke up to it happening,” she remembered.

Later, still in shock, Kendzior messaged the man on Facebook. He elided what he had done to Kendzior and, since he was a year above her, made it an issue of fraternization, a punishable offense. “Keep your mouth shut, don’t say anything, or we’ll both get in trouble,” he said. She dealt with it by putting it out of her mind as best she could. “There was a lot of that shame built in, like I shouldn’t have been drinking,” she says. Because he was in her company, she had to see him at every meal for weeks on end.

A month later, she was raped for a second time by two different midshipmen on the varsity basketball team.

Thinking an upperclass midshipman was trying to hook her up with a classmate she considered a friend, Kendzior went to hang out with them at a nearby hotel (something midshipmen do to drink away from prying eyes). Less than halfway through a red cup full of a drink they had mixed for her, Kendzior blacked out.

“The next thing I know, I realized I was being raped by this upperclassman,” she said. She was only awake for a few seconds before passing out again, and would later learn the man she thought was her friend joined in.

For two and a half years, Kendzior did not report the incidents. She encountered what appeared to be studious avoidance at the academy. When doctors asked her if she had ever been assaulted, she answered affirmatively, but they did not ask follow-up questions.

Her depression compounded until she had a breakdown in March 2011, complete with thoughts of suicide. She was hospitalized and diagnosed with borderline personality disorder, something that would be brought up when she ultimately decided that year to report her rape.

The navy convened a panel in the summer of 2011, attended by approximately 25 naval officers, and, extraordinarily, put her medical file on a screen. It exposed her struggles with depression, the antidepressants the navy doctors prescribed her, and her suicidal ideations (such carelessness for her privacy would be clearly illegal for a civilian organization). In other words, the navy was calling her crazy.

The panel lasted approximately an hour and concluded she was unfit to continue. Kendzior’s military career was over before she was ever even commissioned. The three men who raped her, as far as she knows, became navy officers.

In an interview, Reape told the Guardian:“It is one of my great regrets in the navy that I didn’t get on an airplane, fly up there and tell those sons of bitches, ‘You think you’re going to take on a 20-year old girl?’”

A lawsuit against the navy and the defense department leadership went nowhere. Kendzior decided against suing her rapists directly, as “once you do that, you give them the microphone”. Instead, she has crusaded against military sexual assault in a high-profile fashion – ESPN even ran a story in 2013 on her fight against the Naval Academy – while serving as a project manager for a Dallas-area IT company and working toward her MBA.

“I know I didn’t do anything wrong. If I leave without a fight, that’s me giving up and then they win. You have to fight back,” she said.

Yet this is how the Naval Academy described Kendzior in her official separation papers: “[S]he does not display leadership or maturity expected of a [senior midshipman] and I do not believe she is capable of reaching ‘officer-level’ maturity without professional psychological treatment.”

•••

Rape prosecutions within the military are rare, and convictions rarer still. The survivors advocacy network Protect Our Defenders found that in 2015 only 20% of eligible cases made it to prosecution. Of those, 9% yielded a conviction.

“No one ever tells you what you would feel if you went through the whole process and then didn’t get the result,” said a woman the Guardian will call Sara.

In 2012, Sara was at a friend’s house not far from Fort Hood, Texas, where she was stationed. She had drunk some recreational Robitussin and, high, didn’t feel comfortable with the male strangers hitting on her. To get home, she did as she was instructed during the pre-weekend safety briefs and called her squad leader. The squad leader took her back to his apartment and raped her.

For months, Sara told hardly anyone what had happened. Her unit had gone through a previous sexual assault episode and she remembered everyone, “myself included”, refusing to believe the victim out of a sense of camaraderie. The anxiety she developed gave way to panic attacks she didn’t want to explain, and the army assigned her the sedative Klonopin.

Sara transferred out of her battalion to avoid seeing her attacker. Her future husband, who encouraged Sara to report the rape, ended up deploying with him. His increasing anger toward the attacker led to the end of his deployment, and at that point, Sara felt she had to come forward for his sake. Without counsel and “zombied out” from the Klonopin, she gave a hazy statement to the army’s criminal investigation division that would end up significantly different from a subsequent statement that wasn’t influenced by the drug.

Prosecutors, friends and others encouraged Sara to proceed with court-martialing her attacker. They told her that unless she came forward, he would be free to hurt others. Yet the trial featured techniques familiar to civilian women who do the same. “They said I was mentally ill,” Sara recalled, even using her father’s mental-health history to sow doubt among the jurors.

Worse, her former friends lined up as character witnesses for her assailant, an unanticipated consequence of Sara leaving the bond of her old unit.

Over a year after her attacker’s acquittal, Sara regrets coming forward. “A huge part of the hurt I still feel from what had happened is now related to what had happened through the court martial and the whole reporting process,” she said.

Former US navy petty officer third class Brian Lewis testified before Congress in 2013 about being sexually assaulted by a superior officer. Photograph: Courtney Perry/The Guardian

In Brian Lewis’s case, reporting his own assault to command led to reprisals.

Lewis, 36, joined the navy in 1997 and became a submariner. He recalls his days aboard subs with pride. Only when he was moved to the USS Frank Cable, a submarine tender, was he raped, pierside, aboard the ship.

For over two weeks while their ship was under way, Brian Lewis had nowhere to escape from his attacker, a senior noncommissioned officer. They were in the Pacific Ocean, steaming away from their Guam homeport. Lewis became fearful of going to sections of the USS Frank Cable required for his job. He began cutting himself and ended up needing medical evacuation to Japan.

“It’s kind of hard to hide when you only have 600 feet or so to run from somebody,” he said.

Lewis, who was 20 in 2000, took the attack to his command. He was told to let it drop. It was the era of don’t-ask-don’t-tell, and the infamous policy of closeting LGBT service members had a perverse effect on sexual assault victims. “You know,” Lewis remembers an officer telling him, “homosexual activity is grounds for discharge.” Out of fear, Lewis followed his command’s advice not to report the rape.

Lewis had no prior psychiatric problems, but the PTSD resulting from the rape “savaged my life”. When he complained about receiving no medical treatment other than a perfunctory pill prescription – a situation echoing the heavy medication given to Kendzior and Sara – Lewis received a diagnosis of a personality disorder, followed by a discharge from service.

“If the military has to medically retire you, they’re on the hook for payouts for potentially the remainder of your life, as well as healthcare. So there’s a monetary savings there,” he said. “In my case, it was retaliation for complaining about the lack of medical treatment I was receiving at the time … the fact that I had talked to my command about being a victim and then for saying, ‘Look, you need to do more than simply give me pills.’”

Phillips: ‘He told me I needed to buck up and become a man and fight back.’ Photograph: Shane Lavalette/The Guardian

Lewis joined the military so he would have money for college. Phillips also came from a working-class background, but while he wanted to help his family financially – even dropping out of school to enlist early so his mother would have one fewer mouth to feed – serving had always been his dream.

Phillips’s father and stepfather were both Vietnam veterans, and as he grew up in the 1980s steeped in pro-military pop culture, he worked out a plan. First he’d join the navy and then he’d transition to the army, like his father and stepdad. Even boot camp in 1988 was a dream come true: “It was like family. We worked together, these people helped me, I was pampered.”

So when his shipmates from the ammunition ship USS Butte invited him to hang out in New York City, Phillips didn’t hesitate. It was his first time in the city and Times Square wowed him, especially when the men he wanted to be like started pouring him drinks back at their hotel. Phillips was no novice to drinking, but something in his beer made him groggy.

“The next thing you know, I’m waking up, I’m on the floor, and what’s waking me up was the tug of my pants. Soon as I open up my eyes – I was laying on my back – I open up my eyes and there’s this guy standing above me with his genitals in his hand,” Phillips remembered, while another man had a hand on Phillips’s own genitals. When he ran to the bathroom to escape them, he heard his shipmates laughing at him.

When Phillips got back to the Butte, he immediately told the master-at-arms what had happened. The master-at-arms asked if Phillips was homesick. He denied it. “I think you’re lying. I think you just want to go back home,” Phillips remembers being told.

The New York assault was a prologue of what Phillips was in for aboard ship. His shipmates threw urine on him, stuffed his pillow with feces, threw him out of his bunk and pulled his mouth open. They would force their genitals inside, telling Phillips that if he bit down, they would kill him. No one interfered to protect him.

“These guys were not doing this to sexually be gratified,” but rather to dominate him, Phillips said. “I’m 45 years old and I still have nightmares from this. I’m 45 and there are still things that spark my memory, and I’m shaking and I’m scared.”

After weeks of escalating attacks, Phillips walked to a storage area and tried to hang himself. It didn’t work. A petty officer came across him and helped him down before “smacking the crap out of me. He told me I needed to buck up and become a man and fight back.” The rape was anything but a secret aboard the ship.

I’m 45 years old, and I still have nightmares from this

Heath Phillips

Suicidal, humiliated and alone, Phillips went Awol. He returned to his upstate New York home, living in abandoned cars or on the streets to dodge the police knocking on his parents’ doors to find him. That didn’t work either: Phillips ended up jailed, and from there, transferred to a naval brig.

Soon, he was back aboard the Butte, where the attacks got worse. He was now known as a snitch. When his shipmates raped him in the shower with a shampoo bottle and a toilet brush, the infirmary informed him that he had suffered a hemorrhoid rupture.

Phillips would never have the military career of his boyhood dreams. His navy service was a cycle of rape and incarceration until he received an other-than-honorable discharge. He was back home at just 18 years old, where he turned to drugs and alcohol.

It took Phillips two decades to reach his rock bottom, that night on the road. His recovery has seen him extensively research sexual assault in the military; fight a veterans affairs department that maintains his trauma is not related to his service; and try to help others who went through what he did.

Now, Phillips is the executive director of Mr MST, or Men Recovering from Military Sexual Trauma, a group Lewis co-founded. On 21 September, they spoke at a briefing in Washington hosted by the bipartisan chairs of the Military Sexual Assault Prevention Caucus.

A report last year from the Government Accountability Office raised alarms about the military addressing male sexual assault. The Pentagon’s health affairs office has not “systematically identified whether male victims have any gender-specific needs”, it found, nor has it “established goals or metrics to gauge sexual assault-related issues for male servicemembers.”

“The perception in DC is that they understand military sexual trauma,” Phillips said, “but they didn’t understand that it’s a man’s issue.”

•••

Men and women who have survived military sexual assault have concrete ideas for the Pentagon on how to fix this crisis. Many back a measure championed by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, a New York Democrat, to take prosecuting rape out of the chain of command, an effort at removing a conflict of interest for commanders who have to weigh a servicemember’s value to a mission or unit against an accusation of assault.

But the Pentagon is wary of any measure changing the chain of command, the backbone of military discipline and effectiveness, and Gillibrand’s effort was defeated in June.

Kendzior said she doesn’t understand why the services will undergo extensive testing for changes in uniform camouflage patterns but won’t pilot a sexual assault prevention program free of the influence of command in a non-deployment atmosphere, like a service academy.

“This epidemic is undermining our military and its ability to attract our nation’s best,” Kendzior said. She said she has heard from talented young women who are ruling out military service to avoid being sexually harassed or assaulted.

Kendzior and her father Russ back Gillibrand’s bill. So does Hillary Clinton, the Democratic presidential nominee.

Kendzior’s father, Russ, has a MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN sign in one of the rooms of his house. He doesn’t trust Clinton – “her husband is a predator,” he said – and supports Trump. Although he concedes Trump has “sexist views”, he hopes that Trump’s mantra of change will extend to stopping military rape.

“Dammit, he better put up. I want to put him on the spot: Mr Trump, I’m leaning in your direction. You prove to me and my daughter, who is a victim of sexual assault, and all the Annies and Andys out there, that you are going to make a change,” said Russ Kendzior.

Other sexual assault survivors do not share the same faith in the Republican candidate.

Lewis finds Trump’s statements abhorrent. “Mr Trump demonstrates a complete lack of knowledge on the issue of military sexual assault in particular and on sexual assault generally,” he says. “The issue of military sexual assault is not one that’s gender-specific, and the integration of men and women together in the units is not the primary cause or any cause of sexual assault in our military.”

He continues: “We still contend with a stigma. Whether true or not for an individual, we [male survivors] are still seen in some quarters as homosexual. Unfortunately, that’s a societal stigma as a whole, but still, that perception adds to the sense of isolation and vulnerability that exists as part of the American definition of masculinity.”

“By failing to acknowledge that 53% of victims are men in our armed forces, Mr Trump has effectively excluded a majority of victims – men – from the conversation regarding how to address this particular issue.”

After Trump stood his ground during a forum in September, retired air force colonel Don Christensen, the president of Protect Our Defenders, said: “Mr Trump’s destructive victim blaming shows he fundamentally misunderstands the problem. It diminishes women’s enormous contributions to our nation’s defense and ignores the fact that more than 50% of the victims are male.”

“His tweet was despicable. What can you say?” added Susan Burke, a prominent lawyer who has represented military sexual assault survivors, including Kendzior. “We were all quite disappointed that President Obama did not support the [Gillibrand] legislative fix. We are hopeful that President Clinton will.”

In the US, the National Suicide Prevention Hotline is 1-800-273-8255. The Safe Helpline for victims of sexual assault in the military is 877-995-5247. Protect Our Defenders also provides help for survivors.